Gay Marriage, Again

I had a heated discussion last night about gay marriage. I was rude from time to time, but I was frustrated by my own inability to form coherent sentences. This keyboard has a "backspace" key. I often wish my mouth did, too. Anyway, if I could have done so, I would have made the following cogent statements:

1. This may, in fact, be a Civil Rights issue or a Human Rights issue. If it is - and I'm not conceding that it is - then Congress has no authority to issue any laws restricting gay marriage. That argument hasn't yet been made before the United States Supreme Court - probably because the progressive left is afraid of being ruled against.

2. I am not homophobic. Well, maybe I am. It really all depends on how one defines the term. If I'm talking to a Cambridge liberal, I'm not just a homophobe I'm an especially intolerant and hateful NAZI homophobe. If I'm talking to a Virginia conservative, I'm a damned communist and a queer lover (quick, Clem, grab the hangin' rope).

So take your pick, but I don't think the label's very helpful.

I'm conservative. That means that I quite literally resist change. The bigger the proposed change, the more I resist it. As I said to someone not that long ago, if you told me 25 years ago that our president would be a black, coke-snorting, dope-smoking, socialist Harvard professor, and that he would be arguing in favor of letting two men get married, I'd have called you nuts.

So, yeah, gay marriage is a big proposed change and I am leery of it on principal. So are a lot of other folks. That doesn't make us evil. A bit slow, maybe, but not evil.

3. Western civilization's concept of marriage has at all times and in all places been understood to be a relationship between a man and a woman. There has been homosexuality, infidelity, bisexuality, polygamy, and divorce at various times in history, but gay marriage? Nope. Never happened. That was a crime in most societies, punishable by death. For progressives to argue - as they have been - that defining marriage as a heterosexual relationship is a novel and modern interpretation is stupid and disingenuous.

4. This whole situation has arisen because some gay couples want to be treated exactly the same as heterosexual couples. Exactly that same. No differences. Nothing less is acceptable. Nothing. Less. Ever. Anywhere.

Really? Really?? It's not enough to be married in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but you've just got to be able to be married in Columbus, Ohio as well? If that's how you feel, then that's how you feel, and I understand the point of view. I do. But REALLY??? You can't just leave it alone? I mean, it upsets me that I can't carry a pistol in New York City - second amendment and all - but I kind of live with that because I don't want to visit there let alone live there and I really think that maybe if you just kind of resigned yourself to not living in Madison, Wisconsin, we could focus a little more clearly on the economy.

Because if you had a really good job and could take a vacation in the Bahamas every February and if you could afford to live with your state-recognized spouse in a really nice New York brownstone, probably you'd worry about it less.